Flying Lotus Grieves for Late Mother on 'Cosmogramma'

Posted on May 12th 2010 2:00PM by Mike Ayers
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Electronic music often gets branded as cold and sterile by naysayers, a side-effect of, perhaps, its reliance on techniques that don't seem "real" the way an acoustic guitar does. For Los Angeles-based electronic musician Flying Lotus, such is hardly the case. Like many electronic musicians these days, his latest effort 'Cosmogramma' isn't just something that you're supposed to show up to a club and dance a bit to then go home unfazed.

"The first half of the record is way dark, way bleak," Flying Lotus tells Spinner. "There are so many different things that are going on. I was going through a lot, thinking about things -- a lot of weird stuff was happening. My mom passed away. I'd started working on the record and it was very unexpected. I feel like this record is my grieving process. I go through the whole spectrum of emotions, but it has some really beautiful things going on. I had some great people around me and I had to tell that story too."

As we noted at this past year's SXSW, Flying Lotus has a knack for layering sounds upon each other and creating fast cuts that make 'Cosmogramma' one of the year's most intriguing listens. Just the breaks and laser sounds that line the opener, 'Clock Catcher,' are confusing as they are coherent. It's the Flying Lotus paradox.

"The layering process, it's tough but it's the most fun," he says. "I wanted people to feel meaning as soon as it's on. Whether it's me or someone else, you're trying to create a universe."

Flying Lotus's universe is a lush, surreal one. He often augments his tracks with a heavy dose of strings, harps and melds those into beats, getting his cousin Ravi Coltrane to play sax and people like Thom Yorke to drop vocals, as well as sampling ping-pong games. Not a bad sounding world to live in at all.

"A friend of mine asked me in my early days, 'What's your thing going to be like?'" he recalls. "I said, 'I don't know -- do some cool stuff onstage. But I just want to be me, do my s---.' All that smoke and mirror s--- gets in the way. I want people to know I'm a real person, that I have experience and try to make sense of it myself."

'Cosmogramma' is out now on Warp Records.